Executives need to focus at least 50% of their time on getting their house (infrastructure) in order due to global competition, business requirements and issues, shrinking IT budgets, and unhappy customers. They have no choice but to get cost-effective. But it’s not too late.

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Times have changed. The MIS managers in the 1970s and 1980s knew every aspect
of their infrastructure. There were no surprises. They were very much in tune
with their infrastructure, especially those people and process issues I highlight
throughout all the articles and the books published by Harris
Kern’s Enterprise Computing Institute. They let their system programmers
and DBAs worry about the technology. Their biggest concern was reliability,
availability, and serviceability (RAS). The MIS managers of yesteryear were
responsible for providing RAS. IT wouldn’t be what it is today without
their relentless pursuit of RAS. We can learn from their experiences and the
way they managed. They were involved; they spent time in the trenches with the
enlisted. They were credible leaders to their troops because they typically
came up from the ranks and had established their expertise.

Today is a whole new ballgame. Yet, to be successful, CIOs need to show the
same leadership as their peers of the 1970s, and they need to set accountability
standards.

Infrastructures are bending, bleeding, and becoming more costly than ever because
everyone’s supporting more disparate systems than ever before. Very little
time is being focused on implementing key processes. (Actually, the organization
structure is so far off center that such processes would not be effective in
this environment anyway.)

CIOs everywhere have been focusing on new systems development and deployment.
They know that development is where they get the biggest bang for the buck.
(And, of course, it’s the politically correct thing to do.) The faster
new systems are deployed to meet the needs of the business, the easier it is
for the CIO to gain peer respect in the short run. Unfortunately, this modus
operandi doesn’t encourage long-term planning.

What about the long-term impact of continuously adding network information
systems? If new applications don’t fit into the overall IT architecture,
or don’t have ample bandwidth or adequate support from the DBAs, they don’t
work. Believe me, I’ve seen too many examples of well-intended projects
going amok because they were created in a vacuum, without consideration of the
infrastructure required to support them.

Executives Out of Touch with Their Infrastructure

Executive management needs to get involved! Things are desperately out of
control with the IT infrastructure. Yet management really doesn’t know how
bad it is. It’s a real mess out there, as I’ve depicted in previous
articles. The problem is that executive management is overloaded but now
it’s become a crisis.

As a first step, management needs to dedicate a few days to understanding the
issues that their organization is facing. Executives need to spend just a few
days in the trenches with their technical staff to get the true picture. The
horrors they uncover will shock them—a wakeup call that they’ll never
forget. This is a necessity!

But that’s not enough. Executive management has to establish a set of
common metrics to judge how well the organization is meeting its daily,
short-term, and long-term objectives. By having common metrics, everyone in the
organization will speak the same lingo. Think about the data centers of the
1960s and 1970s. Typically, the data center was one location where everyone
worked together. Today, applications development staffs are scattered around the
world, the data center has become a compendium of different data centers, and
executives are not located together. It’s no wonder that people are out of
touch with one another—and why executives are so easily out of touch with
their organizations. The point is for everyone to be in touch with what’s
happening, to have up-to-the-minute news and measurements for performance so
that management can be proactive, not reactive.

With a common set of metrics that everyone in the organization understands,
everyone on the IT team can immediately gauge how the team is doing against its
own measurements. My contention is that you only achieve high-level RAS when you
understand what the measurements mean. Too often I’ve seen IT executives
gloss over the nuts and bolts of making RAS possible. Executives assume that RAS
is the responsibility of lower-level data center and network managers, without
understanding the linkage of the different components that make this possible.
By having a common metric system for RAS, different managers can see how
different departments are performing, and they can correlate results among
departments.

Supporting client/server applications encompasses multiple hardware and
software components that must be monitored to ensure a RAS environment. Products
such as Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView and Computer Associates’ UniCenter
can provide seamless interfaces to hardware and software products to gather
operational statistics and other data. Microsoft’s MSM and Paradigm’s
desktop software management tools can provide for desktop management and ensure
that only approved software is loaded on desktops.

Information about the network computing environment is critical for RAS. The
dashboard of information should include basic data points like these: